Taxicles invade the city

A city and its citizens cannot exist without transportation. Because of wars, dysfunctional government bodies and lack of physical planning, Metro Manila and other Philippine urban centers have had to with ad hoc public transportation systems that can never catch up with demand and whose only real product is pandemonium in our roads. (We really do not have any streets, since that word implies that these make accommodations for people and their needs, too, and not just cars.)

This state of transport madness has an interesting history, and new directions that on the one hand offer ingenious solutions based on available resources, but on the other just covers up for basic flaws in the way we expand our cities.

Early in the 20th century, when Manila was much smaller in population and size, we had the highly efficient tranvias. They existed side by side with the older calesa and caretela systems. The system covered the old city and its immediate suburbs, as well as interfaced with suburban trains that took people as far as Pasig and Antipolo.

In the 1930s, when the city became more crowded and the tranvia system was taxed to the fullest, Filipinos came up with a hybrid that mixed the calesa with the quickly multiplying automobile that Americans were exporting to the world. The auto-calesa was a new animal that charged multiple passengers a single fare for a ride. This was the jitney system that was invented in the United States. (Jitney is American slang for a nickel — the price for a ride anywhere on the route.)

The auto-calesas and their demon drivers wrought havoc on Manila’s streets, because they wove in an out of slower calesa and tranvia traffic, not being tied down to rails like the tranvias. (Manila then had streets because they had sidewalks with arcades, and people could actually use them). Auto-buses also started to augment the more formal tranvia routes, but before these three motorized systems could be integrated, war broke out.

The Second World War destroyed the tranvia system, and no auto-calesas were left to ply the streets. Horses were also collateral damage in the war, so few calesas could immediately serve the newly liberated public. The only available vehicle was the US army jeep, and thousands of them were going for a song or a barter. Post-war Pinoys quickly put the auto-calesa body on the jeep, and the jeepney was born.

Jeepneys quickly took over as kings of the road. They eventually spread like a virus that still infects our cities to this day. Until LRTs and MRTs were introduced late in our contemporary urban lifetime, the ubiquitous jeepney (and rickety buses made from surplus truck parts) represented a temporary system that became the inefficient but dominant way for people to get around.

In the meanwhile, all our cities had expanded to mega-metropolitan sizes. Jeepneys that ruled in inner urban cores, because of their pervasiveness and political clout, had proliferated beyond rational numbers and today, they are an anachronistic part of all our inner urban areas. You can’t get rid of them, and politicians coddle them — just like informal settlers, who are another reflection of our society’s and our government’s inability to provide basic services to its citizens. (Transport and housing — there’s also health and sanitation, but I’ll leave that to another article.)

In the ’90s, the availability and affordability of another transport alternative gave rise to a further permutation of this ad hoc jitney (one-fare, market-driven route) system — the FX. AUVs, or Asian utility vehicles, were being produced in greater numbers to serve the exploding population and connect them from more distant dormitory suburbs to the metropolis’ now multi-located business and commercial districts. The fact that they had air-conditioning and semi-comfortable seats made them a better alternative to the crowded armpit-smelling pollution-exposed seating of jeepneys. The traffic was still there, but at least they could doze off in air-conditioned but still polluted air.

So what happens when you allow all these ad hoc systems to crowd already crowded urban roads? You get more traffic and, often, it is faster to walk — except, of course, there are no sidewalks to walk on because local and national public works departments have usurped all the space for the growing number of vehicles. If there are sidewalks at all, they are often commandeered as parking, space to plant utility poles, strombotic streetlamps (can’t they just be mounted on the utility poles?) or barangay outposts.

In the neverending cycle of finding solutions that actually just contribute to the overall craziness of our so-called modern transport system, Pinoys have embraced another new source of motive madness — the cheap China-made motorcycle.

Notice in Manila, Cebu, Davao, and most everywhere, a growing number of motorcycles with always with a passenger behind. Well, these are the new “taxicles.” This word rhymes with a part of the male anatomy because you have to have (pardon my French) cojones to choose this mode of transport. Hop on board and weave in and out of the traffic caused by buses, jeepneys and FXs. With taxicles, you can get to your destination in half the time but with twice the risk of dismemberment.

The tricycle has been, thankfully, banned from main streets, but they are another problem altogether for residential communities. With taxicles cheaper than tricycles, this problem will grow along with noise and pollution levels, as most of these are powered by pollutive and noisy two-stroke engines.

These taxicles are operating in larger and larger numbers. Hello LTFRB, aren’t you guys supposed to regulate land transport? I’ve often wondered if the LTFRB actually correlates the number of public utility vehicles to actual road space and demand — or do they just give in to the demands of transport lobbies?

Maybe they are not to be blamed — just like not blaming the Disaster Management Department (or is it Office?) for the various disasters that constantly billboard — excuse me — badger us every year.

All these ad hoc transport systems just add to our continuing transport woes. Our cities aren’t walkable save for the interiors of shopping malls. They grow with no rhyme or reason since city planning has been given up to market forces and the profit-oriented initiative of private developers. Most people travel by public transport, but defunct systems like jeepneys are kept in place for the political fear of losing votes or tong.

Yes, we should celebrate the inventiveness and ingenuity of the Pinoy. Taxicles, FXs and jeepneys are quaint, but they solve only the symptoms and do not provide the cure. We trade off safety and sanity to continuously bypassing longer-term, harder solutions — a colorum mentality we find as difficult to shake off as our colonial one.

So what’s next?

It’s not turning jeepneys to battery power. This laudable program and that of forcing buses to switch to LPG will definitely lessen pollution but it will not reduce the excessive numbers of vehicles on our roads or reduce travel times between home and work.

The road to metropolitan salvation does not lie in giving more drivers work but in working to drive urban salvation towards rational physical planning, making our cities more humane and compact as well as redefining our social goals as an (now predominantly and irreversibly) urban nation.

* * *

Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.